Posing between two sets of turtle tracks, so you get a sense of how big they are. This turtle decided not to nest; we found these tracks on our morning beach walk day. The turtle went up out of the water, looked around, then returned to the sea, leaving two sets of tracks.
Last week I was with my daughter in Costa Rica.
This week I am home. It is Friday night, and it is raining, but there is a Blizzard Warning for my area. The snow is supposed to start soon and last through the day Saturday into Sunday. We might get more than a foot. I cancelled all the massage appointments that I had scheduled for tomorrow, stopped at the market on my way home to buy celery (in case I decide to make chicken salad. Strange, the things you think you must stock up on if a snowstorm is on the way), parked my AWD car up the street out of the way of the snow plow, and am happily staying inside for the rest of the weekend. Right now, the ground is just very wet. The water is pooling in front of my house. The stream that pops up after heavy rainfall is running through the backyard.
Also? The power just went out.
I am kind of missing Costa Rica right now.
Last week I walked with my daughter on the beach for hours one night. Beach walking is part of her job, one of her duties as an intern with the Leatherback Trust organization. It sounds idyllic.
“Your job is to walk the beach? Tough life!” people say to her.
That’s what I thought, too. Until I actually did it with her. It’s harder than it seems.
We started around 8:00 pm and finished past 2:00 am. Up the beach to the end marker. Back to the start. Again. All this purposeful walking in the middle of the night can make you a little tired (especially if you just arrived in the country and woke up at 4:15 am to make the 5:00 am hotel shuttle to the airport for your 7:30 am international flight).
But for me, last week? It was worth it. It’s been worth it for her, too. Through the months of the nesting season, there’s been a lot of turtley action. Nesting season is just about finished, though, and her team will be packing up and going their separate ways soon. The chances of me seeing a turtle with her that night weren’t great.
Except as we approached the end of the beach, she stopped. She looked down.
I said, “What? What?”
I was already tired and not sure that I would be able to keep walking and walking for another few hours. I didn’t see anything.
(I am not a skilled turtle tracker.)
But she saw tracks. Not crab tracks (she had already shown me lots of those). Turtle tracks. She followed the line up the beach to where they stopped, underneath a big sticker bush. She peered underneath it, and found the turtle.
A green turtle had already dug out a nest in the sand. She was getting ready to lay her eggs.
